By: Katelyn Norris
College stress can manifest in many ways, from procrastination, to pulling all-nighters to heightening anxiety among students. However, there is manifestation of stress that we can see growing among college students and at Bellarmine itself – eating disorders.
Senior Lily Tway was diagnosed with Avoidance-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)in her senior year of school. When she embarked on her college journey, she discovered the collegiate environment impacted her far more than she expected.
“I have very strong food aversions to most food so my big thing is that when I got to college I don’t have my safe food anymore. What they serve in the cafeteria freaks me out and I don’t like eating in front of people so my freshman year I lost about 10 pounds,” Tway said.
Tway is one of the many college students affected by disordered eating. According to a study by Sabina White and Jocelyn Reynold-Melear from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Elizabeth Cordero from San Diego State University, it was found that the percentage of eating disorders on campus increased substantially for both males and females between 1995 and 2008. Over a 13-year period, the percentage grew from 7.9% to 25% for men and from 23.4% to 32.6% for women.
Professor Erin Weidmar, a registered nutritionist and dietician in the School of Health Professions, said there can be a variety of factors that contribute to eating disorders. She said during the transition to college students lose their familiar social circles, and they are engulfed in a completely new environment, which typically is compounded with a sense of a loss of control.
“College is one of the biggest peaks when it comes to not only a diagnosis but behaviors that are gateway behaviors when it comes to eating disorders. You might have people experimenting with gateway behaviors, it might not develop to full diagnosis but then some might peak,” Weidmar said.
Weidmar said some of these gateway behaviors include avoiding eating with friends and eating large amounts then going to the bathroom.
Junior Mollie Fife has been experimenting with these types of gateway behaviors since being homeschooled for high school, but she said in college is when her disordered eating became much worse.
“I didn’t really know what to expect and I hadn’t been in a classroom for almost 4 years so it just hard to comprehend. At the time the guy that I was dating wasn’t helping like I thought he would,” Fife said. “I just stopped eating in general even though I went to UDH [University Dining Hall] with my roommate and him. If I got food I only ate a third of what I got and then I gave it to my roommate to finish.”
Junior Abby Pitts’ eating disorder worsened when she came to Bellarmine, in part due to the lack of structure and accountability from her family she had at home.
“I definitely went on the worst path with being new at college. I was far away from home new to how to study,” Pitts said. “Being on my own not having the accountability of sitting down at the dinner table with my family caused me to definitely have a lot of struggles with my first year.”
Weidmar explained that the loss of habit is a key factor in developing or worsening of eating disorders. She said these new developing habits can result in all kinds of mental health repercussions and this includes eating disorders.
“College environments – it’s constant are sleeping and eating and it’s all very new. We had this very strong routine within our home environment and now we’re on our own regulating those patterns less often and that can lead to all sorts of concerns around mental health,” Weidmar said.
Fife went through an adjustment period for her routine that affected her eating habits once again. She said her friends were going through a rough situation and needed support so she sidelined her own health for theirs.
“I didn’t want anyone to notice because I just don’t want anyone to worry about me. I am the mom friend so I didn’t worry about myself as much as I should have,” Fife said.
For Tway, she said ARFID greatly affects her overall health even her social life. Tway said she often doesn’t eat around new people and during her freshman year eating in the dining hall became a difficult task.
“When I meet new people I have to explain it to them, and people understand because they have heard about other eating disorders and they ask what ARFID is. But for lack of better words it’s embarrassing,” Tway said.
Pitts said her friends at Bellarmine are have opened her ability to share the social aspects of her eating disorder.
“The social part of college is the reason why I’ve gotten a lot better than I used to be and I am the person that I am today because of it. I used to think like eating disorders were secret and that I couldn’t tell anybody,” Pitts said.
Weidmar emphasized the importance of letting someone know if you are struggling with an eating disorder, as she thought it was essential to not keep it to yourself.
“It’s not a secret to be kept, keeping it a secret is not helpful, it’s not being a good friend you need to tell someone that can get them help,” Weidmar said.
Tway is very passionate about breaking the stigma behind eating disorders and making people aware of what they say to others.
“I feel like people judge what others eat and you never know what someone is dealing with. I feel like people are starting to get to too comfortable commenting on what other people are eating,” Tway said.
Pitts also agrees with this sentiment and she wants people who are also struggling with an eating disorder that it’s far more common than people think.
“I would say that struggles with eating is far more common then we know. Our society really admits you don’t have to be a certain size to have a problem with food or a gender or sexuality ethnicity,” Pitts said. Tway said: “There’s a stigma surrounding eating disorders and for accepting it. People are learning more about mental health and mental illness but there’s a long way to go to really accepting it.”